Bezio’s “From Rome to Tyre to London” brought up a couple of interesting points. First, I agreed with one of her very first assertions that history and fiction are “irreducibly complex.” I am often bothered when leaders try to exactly emulate past figures, or when people applaud current leaders for this emulation, because context is so important. Some people celebrate Trump’s likeness with Ronald Reagan, but the tactics and characteristics that made Reagan stand-out aided his success mainly because of the time period in which he existed. To hone in too much on the individual figures distorts their image. I think part of this emphasis comes from our evolutionary tendency to associate successful societies with good leadership and failing societies with bad leadership, as a previous reading pointed out. I think it would be interesting to further investigate why our emphasis falls on the person and how it relates to this evolutionary tendency.
The largest takeaway from this article was how to connect historical leaders and events to present circumstances. Considering the fact Bezio dedicated the first 11.5 pages to understanding the story and the context in which it was written, that appears to be the first step. In fact, I think it is the most important step when trying to make these connections. As I mentioned before, I object to the comparison between Reagan and Trump because their contexts were so different. Bezio did a great job of breaking down Shakespeare’s context of post-Elizabethan England so that every choice Shakespeare made in his writing made sense in that context. Once that was done, making the connections between those smaller pieces and Brexit was a lot easier and straight-forward. I think that if someone broke down all pieces of Reagan’s presidency then I would object less to an off-hand comparison of the two because the argument would be more concrete. Once Bezio broke down all the pieces of Shakespeare, i was impressed by how easy and intuitive those connections to a modern concept were, showing how important a through investigation of the past is. I think it will be interesting because 50 years, 100years, 200 years from now people will be analyzing and breaking down events like Brexit or Donald Trump’s election, having to explain every bit of context which makes perfect sense to us because we are living in it.
I agree that history is “irreducibly complex” and find that that is one of the problems I have with learning and telling history. In history classes growing up we are given the bare-bones overview of events in order to cover all of the events we have to. But in doing this, history is reducing to its most simple form and leaves out incredibly important perspectives and nuances. This makes me wonder how we can seek to improve the quality of teaching history while still accomplishing everything our current education system mandates.
I really like your points about comparisons across history and especially liked that about the Bezio article. We live in a world dominated by media and culture and therefore, I do think that it is important to acknowledge, and connect, leaders and leadership from this sphere to our current lives. To me, this is why I liked Bezio’s comments so much because I liked how like you said, she made these connections understandable and intuitive.
I also think the complexity is extremely important to understand. Like you said, the Reagan to Trump comparisons are not valid, but were still influential in Trump securing the nomination and presidency. It’s important to be able to understand why that comparison is not valid, in order to debunk it. It can be easy to simplify history to fit whatever context we need right now.